Did You Know Tuesday

Did you know that one of the reasons that the Plague (aka “the Pestilence”, “Black Death”) spread so quickly throughout Europe in the mid-14th century, wiping out over one-third of the population was because of the Catholic church? At a time when they were trying to spread their ideology, the Catholic leaders encouraged their followers to kill cats, which they associated with the devil and witchcraft (interestingly, there is no devil in the Wicca religion, but the Catholic religion has never let facts get in the way of anything). With millions of felines killed over a couple of hundred years, there was a decline in the population of this natural predator of the rats and mice who carried the Oriental rat fleas that harbored the plague virus. Now that the rats and mice could run around unchecked, the plague spread fast and would eventually wipe out millions of people in Europe.